Mac Time Machine / Back ups / Partitions

I have terabyte hard drive bought from the mac store and a mac book which I back up regularily using the Time Machine.

Its now saying it is full, what should I do? I've tried to delete back ups before and it either takes hours or won't delete them properly.

The back ups date back to March 2010 so if I delete say March 2010 until May 2011 will that make my most recent (June 2011) back up miss out on loads of files (because i've deleted the history?)

ALSO!! someone told me to "partition" my drive? Why should I do this? what does it do?

And finally.... I mainly want to keep all my photos and itunes on the hard drive and not on my computer therefore should I have folders set up on the externaly hard drive and just drag them in? or are they copied in when doing my back ups already??

sorry to be so stupid but there doesn't seem to be a manual for our harddrive and I can't find any answers to these questions online....

I have terabyte hard drive bought from the mac store and a mac book which I back up regularily using the Time Machine.

Its now saying it is full, what should I do? I've tried to delete back ups before and it either takes hours or won't delete them properly.

The back ups date back to March 2010 so if I delete say March 2010 until May 2011 will that make my most recent (June 2011) back up miss out on loads of files (because i've deleted the history?)

ALSO!! someone told me to "partition" my drive? Why should I do this? what does it do?

And finally.... I mainly want to keep all my photos and itunes on the hard drive and not on my computer therefore should I have folders set up on the externaly hard drive and just drag them in? or are they copied in when doing my back ups already??

sorry to be so stupid but there doesn't seem to be a manual for our harddrive and I can't find any answers to these questions online....

Please help me....

buy a new 2tb twin mirror drives
that 4tb total
copy all of your filled back up data over to the new twinned 2tb drive 's. and then copy from the new 2TB drive <<< ONE >>> over to drive <<< TWO >>> <<so your back up is saved 2x >>>

DELETE the first old drive and use as a great data transfer junction or high end final cut pro aperture daily back up <<<< like if you making movies you can store it their >>>

I have terabyte hard drive bought from the mac store and a mac book which I back up regularily using the Time Machine.

Its now saying it is full, what should I do? I've tried to delete back ups before and it either takes hours or won't delete them properly.

The back ups date back to March 2010 so if I delete say March 2010 until May 2011 will that make my most recent (June 2011) back up miss out on loads of files (because i've deleted the history?)

ALSO!! someone told me to "partition" my drive? Why should I do this? what does it do?

And finally.... I mainly want to keep all my photos and itunes on the hard drive and not on my computer therefore should I have folders set up on the externaly hard drive and just drag them in? or are they copied in when doing my back ups already??

sorry to be so stupid but there doesn't seem to be a manual for our harddrive and I can't find any answers to these questions online....

Please help me....

First of all, you're not stupid and there are very few stupid questions. ;-)

How have you tried to delete older backups? If you're using Time Machine, it should automatically delete the oldest backup when it runs out of space.

Partitioning the drive may be a good idea if you're using it for Time Machine backups and if you manually copy to it as well. What that means is you could, for example, partition, i.e. split up the entire 1TB hard drive into two logical partitions, which means you will create two independent "areas" of the hard drive. Mac OS X makes this process pretty easy with Disk Utility (in the Applications/Utilities folder). However, if your drive is pretty full, you won't be able to partition it until you get your data, or a significant portion anyway, off the drive and free up space.

Let's say you divide the space equally so you would end up with 2 partitions each containing 500GB worth of hard drive space. You could dedicate one partition to your Time Machine backups and nothing else and the other partition could be used for storage of photos, videos and/or whatever content/files you want to store externally like you said.

By the way, do you really need a whole year's worth of backups? I'm guessing that you don't and that you're wasting a lot of space, which you obviously need for other data. Since Time Machine cannot be configured to only back up a particular amount of data, you would be able to limit Time Machine from backing up no more than 500GB, again using the above mentioned example, by partitioning the drive into two parts.

If you feel unsure and don't want to jeopardize your data, I think someone at the Apple store where you bought your drive (or another one, it doesn't really matter) will be happy to help you figure this out.

Let us know if this is making any sense and if you need more help. Good luck!

I've have tried to partition my drive as you've said but it says it needs to be empty first? and as I've nowhere to put the current data that's on there Im not sure what to do.

I have deleted all my time machine back ups and just backed up once and then turned the time machine off. I thought could just turn it on every few months and that should take up less space.

Also - one more wee thing! Do you know where your Iphoto files are stored? We've Itunes set so that if we upload a CD the files go straight onto the hard drive but in iphoto they just go into the iphoto-sphere and I can't see them.

Thanks again very much for your help,

Best wishes

S x

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crunch

First of all, you're not stupid and there are very few stupid questions. ;-)

How have you tried to delete older backups? If you're using Time Machine, it should automatically delete the oldest backup when it runs out of space.

Partitioning the drive may be a good idea if you're using it for Time Machine backups and if you manually copy to it as well. What that means is you could, for example, partition, i.e. split up the entire 1TB hard drive into two logical partitions, which means you will create two independent "areas" of the hard drive. Mac OS X makes this process pretty easy with Disk Utility (in the Applications/Utilities folder). However, if your drive is pretty full, you won't be able to partition it until you get your data, or a significant portion anyway, off the drive and free up space.

Let's say you divide the space equally so you would end up with 2 partitions each containing 500GB worth of hard drive space. You could dedicate one partition to your Time Machine backups and nothing else and the other partition could be used for storage of photos, videos and/or whatever content/files you want to store externally like you said.

By the way, do you really need a whole year's worth of backups? I'm guessing that you don't and that you're wasting a lot of space, which you obviously need for other data. Since Time Machine cannot be configured to only back up a particular amount of data, you would be able to limit Time Machine from backing up no more than 500GB, again using the above mentioned example, by partitioning the drive into two parts.

If you feel unsure and don't want to jeopardize your data, I think someone at the Apple store where you bought your drive (or another one, it doesn't really matter) will be happy to help you figure this out.

Let us know if this is making any sense and if you need more help. Good luck!